This invention relates to a method of making sterile cooked, or part-cooked, long-life pasta products continuously on an industrial scale.
In general, in the making of cooked or part-cooked long-life pasta products, it is necessary, on the one side, that the product stability and non-toxicity be ensured throughout its shelf life, and on the other side, that the product physical, organoleptic, and nutritional properties be retained, such that when dressed for immediate consumption, it will compare favorably with a similar traditional product (pasta dish) which has been freshly prepared.
Of these requirements, non-toxicity and long-life preservability are prominent.
To that aim, it is a regular and well-established practice in the art to pre-cook a suitable dough, to form it (e.g. by extrusion through dies yielding macaroni, spaghettis to different sizes and shapes, or by rolling out into a sheet of dough), dry it down to a moisture content below 12.5%, and finally package it into sealed containers.
Since the pasta so obtained is evidently non-sterile, it has been suggested of providing a pre-cooking step by superheated heat for freshly prepared pasta having a moisture content in the 25% to 32% range. However, the sterile condition thus provided for the product is subsequently defeated by the drying and packaging operations.
It has therefore been proposed of packaging the pasta, as freshly prepared, into suitable containers, and then carrying out a heat sterilization step either before or after sealing the containers.
This technique, while providing for a sterile product, is not devoid of some serious drawbacks.
In fact, where heat sterilization is completed prior to the container sealing, despite the latter being immediate, there still exists a risk of losing, or at least significantly lowering, the degree of sterilization imparted to the product. Moreover, the process is of necessity a discontinuous one, and as such, unsuitable for application on an industrial scale.
Where heat sterilization is carried out after sealing the containers, it must be protracted some time at a high temperature level to ensure that a safe sterilizing temperature is also achieved at the package core. Thus, the product is sterilized, but inevitably deprived of those organoleptic and physical properties which are recognized to constitute the discriminating factor in assessing the product quality and its acceptability from the merchandizing standpoint.
Overcoming these and other drawbacks of the prior art is the problem that underlies this invention, the invention being therefore directed to a method of making sterile cooked, or part-cooked, long-life pasta products continuously on an industrial scale, which pasta retains unaltered all the physical, organoleptic, and nutritional characteristics of conventionally made dry pasta.